The present invention relates to a zoom lens with a highly variable power covering a wide-angle to telephoto range for use on 35 mm single-lens reflux cameras.
With the progress and development of zoom lens designing technology, zoom lenses have found widespread use as interchangeable lenses on 35 mm single-lens reflux cameras.
Wide-angle zoom lenses, standard zoom lenses, and telephoto zoom lenses are widely used today. To meet user's demands, in recent years there have been increasing numbers of zoom lenses including wide-angle to semi-telephoto capabilities and semi-wide-angle to telephoto capabilities. However, only a few zoom lenses are known which include a wide-angle capability with a covering angle of about 77.degree. to a telephoto capability with a covering angle of about 18.degree. and which are of high performance and compact for portability. Highly variable power zoom lenses which are compact and relatively high in performance, including wide-angle to telephoto capabilities, are also known for use on single-lens reflux cameras. Such zoom lenses achieve focusing by moving the overall lens system to prevent the diameter of a front lens from becoming increased due to ordinary focusing by a front lens group, thus acting as a varifocal lens. Alternatively, a varying focusing point due to zooming caused by focusing by other optical systems than the front lens group is corrected by a complicated mechanism, resulting in difficulty in the lens manufacture.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454 issued on Nov. 10, 1981 discloses a wide angle to long focus zoom lens, but has the following disadvantages.
The comparisons between the zoom lens according to the present invention and the zoom lens according to the disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454 will be made in terms of 35 mm SLR cameras.
(a) In the zoom lens according to U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454 various aberrations would not be well compensated for. In particular, a spherical aberration is represented by approximately 1 to 3 mm at the telephoto end. According to the present invention, spherical aberration is represented by approximately 0.2 to 0.3 mm at the telephoto end. This distinction means that the lens system according to U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454 would be put into practical use with great difficulty.
(b) The zoom lens according to U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454 would be large in physical size beyond such a limit that it is acceptable as an interchangeable lens for SLR cameras in the market. More specifically, a diameter of the front lens of the zoom lens according to U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454 ranges approximately from 75 to 80 mm. On the other hand, according to the present invention, a diameter of the front lens of the zoom lens is approximately 65 mm, which would easily be acceptable as an interchangeable lens for practical use.
(c) In the zoom lens according to U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454, in spite that the front lens diameter is large as set forth in the item (b) above, an amount of marginal light is very small or represented by zero in some examples described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454. Even if a thickness of an edge portion of each lens element would be made possibly thin while keeping the 35 mm camera image field size at 24.times.36 mm, the amount of marginal light would be still insufficient according to the disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454. This means that it would be difficult to put the zoom lens according to U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454 into practical use.
(d) For the following reasons, in the zoom lens according to U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454, it would be impossible to carry out a so-called front-lens-moving focusing and therefore, the lens system thereof must be of the overall-lens-moving focusing type, which has a serious disadvantage for the zoom lens. On the other hand, according to the present invention, the so-called front-lens-moving focusing may readily be achieved to enable practical short-distance focusing.
As described above, the zoom lens system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,454 may achieve the zooming but is difficult to realize.